NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake testifying before the European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs on September 30, 2013. The Committee has called an inquiry into NSA Mass Surveillance of EU Citizens.

Thank you to the European Parliament and the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee for inviting me to speak before your critically important public hearings – and the challenge you collectively face regarding the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs and their impact on your respective member countries as well as the privacy of citizens in my country and yours.
The fundamental issue before your Committee is a foreign government (often in league with the intelligence apparatus of other countries as well as cooperating internet, phone and data service providers), spying on you under the guise of protecting its own interests in the name of national security – a convenient constraint of monitoring and control especially when conducted in secret – outside the purview of law and public debate – while subverting your sovereignty.

I used to fly as a crypto-linguist on RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft in the greater European theater during the latter years of the Cold War. My primary target of interest was East Germany. The Stasi became monstrously efficient using surveillance to enable their pathological need ‘to know everything’ – their very operating motto. However, I never imagined that the US would use the Stasi playbook as the template for its own state sponsored surveillance regime and turning not only its own citizens into virtual persons of interest, but also millions of citizens in the rest of the world. Do we really want to become subject to and subjects of a secret surveillance state?

In a surveillance state everybody is suspicious and laws protecting privacy and citizen sovereignty are regarded as inconvenient truths bypassed in the name of keeping the rest of us safe and secure as justification for the wanton and surreptitious bulk copy collection and unbridled access to vast amounts of data about our lives. Unfortunately, this surveillance regime has now grown into a globe girdling system that has gone far beyond prosecuting terrorism and other international crimes and wrongdoing.
Your Committee faces the challenge of dealing with a secret hidden shadow surveillance state dissolving the very heart of freedom and liberty and our respective citizen rights and using this power to expand sovereign-free zones – even when it undermines the very fabric of society, breaks trust between nations and endangers the very mechanisms we use for commerce and trade.
This exceptionalism gives rise to an ends justifying the means mentality in violating the sovereignty of other nations and citizens far beyond the real threats we do face from those who would cause us real harm, but often exaggerating those very threats in public for access to all of our data behind the scenes.

When national security services are more than willing to deliberately compromise the very information technology services and protocols that so many citizens as well as commercial and private enterprises rely upon and enjoy for legitimate confidentiality, data protection, and security in order to conduct their day to day business, it becomes very difficult to maintain trust in those systems.

Nothing less than the very sovereignty of our citizens and states are at stake in the face of an unfettered surveillance state apparatus.
From the recent disclosures of Edward Snowden, the US government has routinely violated on a vast industrial scale the Constitutional protections afforded its own citizens, while also disregarding the internal integrity of other states and the fundamental rights of non-US citizens.

I know. Because I was eyewitness to the very foundations of a persistent surveillance state expanded in the deepest of secrecy right after 9/11. I was there at the beginning.
While a senior official at the National Security Agency, I found out about the use of a top secret domestic electronic eavesdropping program that collected and accessed vast amounts of digital data (including phone numbers, e-mail addresses, financial transactions and more), turning the US into the equivalent of a foreign nation for the purposes of blanket dragnet surveillance and data mining – blatantly abandoning and unchaining itself from the Constitution and a 23 year legal regime enacted due to earlier violations of citizen rights by US government’s use and abuse of national instruments of power against Americans in the 60s and 70s.
These secret surveillance programs were born during the first few critical weeks and months following 9/11, as the result of willful decisions made by the highest levels of the US government. Such shortcuts and end-runs were not necessary, as lawful alternatives existed that would have vastly improved US intelligence capability with the best of American ingenuity and innovation, while fundamentally protecting the privacy of citizens at the same time.
I raised the gravest of concerns through internal channels, spoke directly with the NSA Office of the General Counsel, and then became a material witness and whistleblower for two 9/11 congressional investigations in 2002, and then exposing massive fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement at NSA during a multi-year Department of Defense Office of Inspector General audit from 2003-2005 regarding a multi-billion dollar NSA flagship intelligence collection program under development that was far more costly and far less effective in supporting critical intelligence requirements than a readily available and privacy protecting alternative.
I followed all the rules as a whistleblower until it fundamentally conflicted with my oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, and made a fateful choice in 2006 to exercise my First Amendment rights and went to the press with critical information about which the public had a right to know regarding the fraud, waste and abuse as well as the secret and unconstitutional surveillance programs.
However, rather than address the illegality and wrongdoing, the government made me a target of a huge federal criminal “leak investigation” into the exposure of the secret surveillance programs and subjected me to severe retaliation, reprisal and retribution that started with forcing me out from my job as a career public servant. I was subsequently blacklisted, no longer had a stream of income, while simultaneously incurring substantial attorney fees and other huge costs, necessitating a second mortgage on my house, emptying of my bank accounts, including retirement and savings. And that was just the beginning.What I experienced as a whistleblower sends the most chilling of messages about what the government can and will do when one speaks truth to and of power—a direct form of political repression and censorship.And yet once exposed, these unconstitutional detours were (and still are) predictably justified by often vague and undefined claims of national security, while aided and abetted by shameless fear mongering on the part of the government.

And yet we are now in an era where sharing issues of significant concern in the public interest, which do not in any way compromise national security, are often now considered criminal acts of espionage aided and abetted by reporters and the press – yet anathema to a free, open and democratic society.
I did everything I could to defend the inalienable rights of all U.S. citizens and the sovereignty of the individual which were so egregiously violated and abused by my own government—when there was no reason to do so at all, except as an excuse to go to the proverbial ‘dark side’ by exercising unaccountable, irresponsible and “off the books” unilateral executive power in secret.
I blew the whistle because I saw grave injustice, illegality and wrongdoing occurring within the National Security Agency. I was subsequently placed under intense physical and electronic surveillance, raided by the FBI in 2007 and two and half years later under the Obama Administration criminally charged under a 10 felony count indictment including five under the Espionage Act, facing 35 years in prison. The extraordinary charges that were leveled against me by the US Department of Justice are symptomatic of the rising power of the national security state since 9/11 and a direct assault on freedom of speech, thought, innovation, and privacy.
The government found out everything they could about me and turned me into an Enemy of the State. I became the first whistleblower prosecuted in the decades since Daniel Ellsberg, under the draconian World War I-era Espionage Act, a law meant to go after spies, not whistleblowers.Having the secret ability to collect and analyze data with few if any substantial constraints – especially on people, is seductively powerful – and when done without the person’s permission and in secret against their will – is the ultimate form of control over others.

When government surveillance of this magnitude hides behind the veil of secrecy, when it professes openness and transparency while practicing opaqueness and deceit, that’s when citizens need to become very aware and wary of what the future might hold – when their very liberties are eroded and even taken away in the name of national security — without their consent.
The fear engendered through the invocation of threats (real and imagined), creates a climate where rights are ignored as the unifying cause for obsessing over national security and the use of fear by the government to control the public and private agenda.
My criminal case is direct evidence of an out of control and ‘off the books’ government that is increasingly alien to the Constitution and democracy at home and abroad. The rise in this form of a contrary alien form of government assuming the shape of a national security state under surveillance evidences the all too distinct and historically familiar characteristics of an alarming ‘soft tyranny’ and is an anathema to all forms of democracy.
As Montesquieu wrote, “No tyranny is more cruel than that which is practiced in the shadow of the law and with the trappings of justice: that is, one would drown the unfortunate by the very plank by which he would hope to be saved.”
One could make the case that the government chose to make me (and others) targets as part of a much broader campaign against whistleblowers in order to send the strongest possible message about what the government can and will do to suppress dissent and speech it doesn’t like.
And yet the United States’ brutal and unrelenting crackdown on whistleblowers is outdone by the magnitude of what it is now trying to hide or continue as a result of the Snowden disclosures. NSA is not just eavesdropping on all Americans and building the architecture for a police state in the US, it has created the largest set of mass surveillance programs in the history of the world, while covertly weakening Internet security and privacy for everyone on the planet. Without privacy and robust data protections under the law, no real individual citizen sovereignty within a state and society is possible.

NSA is doing this deliberately, systematically, and in secret. Even if we take NSA at its word—its intention to only target persons suspected of terrorism as it relates to foreign intelligence— they’re clearly now collecting and storing as much of our communications as possible.
NSA has inverted and perverted the heart of the democratic paradigm in which the government acts in public and our personal lives are private. Now everyone’s personal and private lives and associated transaction and data history becomes the equivalent of secret government property, held for years as pre-crime data just in case it is needed in the future – secret dossiers of the State – while attempts to expose the government are met with the heavy hand of criminal prosecution.

The words of US Senator Frank Church during the hearings he conducted on the abuses of national security power in the 1970s are worthy of reminding us what can happen when a state sponsored surveillance regime is used as the excuse to keep us safe at the expense of liberty and freedom.
“If a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of government to know. Such is the capacity of technology.”

People in America and around the world should not have to worry about protecting themselves from an unhinged United States government, unchained from its own Constitution, but worry they must. And the government should not, under the guise of protecting its own citizenry, conduct mass dragnet surveillance in secret, let alone the rest of the entire world while publicly crushing anyone who tries to expose it.
I respectfully suggest that your Committee duly examine the critical need for transparency and legal accountability to enforce fundamental and vitally precious citizen rights to speech and association while protecting those who expose government malfeasance and wrongdoing as well as providing for robust protections against unwarranted “search and seizure” by any foreign power, state surveillance agency or corporate entity.
I hope that your Committee will consider a European Union-wide law that all EU-to EU Internet links and nodes must be encrypted, with open source encryption technology made available for the widest possible use wherever practical, while also audited by the EU.

What we see now revealed on a global scale creates the power of mass- surveillance and eludes effective control by current data and privacy protection regulations.
How do your member states protect themselves from the predations of the surveillance regime?

There is a distinct need for policies that prohibit third party countries and commercial concerns from accessing and compromising personal data, while also covering vendors and suppliers of IT systems and products.
There is also the need to put in place the power to prosecute and hold accountable those transnational companies and entities from secretly compromising the very infrastructure that society depends on for business and trade – even considering the need for a comprehensive data protection treaty between member states and the US.
‘Prism-proofing’ your member state Internet hosting and service providers is now critical given how data is not so much broken into as it is taken and renditioned by the surveillance state.
It is the constant possibility of the unequal gaze and reality of surveillance and observation (real or imagined) that stultifies society, renders creativity mute, and erodes our freedom with the acid served up by the potent brew of secrecy and surveillance for the sake of security while forsaking our liberties as the price we must pay. I fundamentally reject this dystopian premise given what happened to me.

In conclusion, I was fortunate that I did not end up in an actual prison for coming out of the system and speaking truth to and of power – a dangerous act of civil disobedience and individuality for sure in these times.

The last thing a free and open society needs is a digital fence around us – with the barbed wire of surveillance not only keeping track of our comings and goings, yet now increasingly wanting to know what we think and feel – the very essence of who we are and share as human beings.

Silent Circle’s CEO takes a rather optimist view on the state of the cryptowars. If only we could reasonably assume that the all-star team of technologists he mentions are incorruptible by the full weight of the nexus of global government/corporate complex, we should see the sunny side of things too.
Yes, learning at least part of the truth due to Snowden is a reason to celebrate – we now know what is done in our name. But what we have learned is so sobering and matches our most dystopian projections so well, at the same time generating so little outrage around the world, that I still cannot be optimistic about a better future.

There have been so many disclosures, revelations and speculations since Snowden fled and the media trickled out one tantalizing slide after the next- that it’s hard not to get overwhelmed. It’s hard not to get angry.

Now that the sheer scope and massive worldwide surveillance of the NSA has come to light over the last few months, it seems as if a veritable cloud of “Privacy Depression” has set in lately among citizens and the technology community at large. Adding to that hot mess is the willing complicity of the tech giants, backbone providers and hardware manufactures. Fuel to the fire.

Yes, there are some feigning outrage, some with true concern, and others calling for heads-on-a-platter while western intelligence agencies and big technology firms hunker down and hope it all goes away. It won’t. It’s only going to get worse for them and the government.

Ok, so, say you’re a person the US government doesn’t like very much. Say you’re charismatic, and give great speeches, and you have ideas they don’t care for. I dunno, maybe that we shouldn’t be killing people without a trial. You know, one of those weird liberal ideas, that extrajudicial executions are bad. And you’ve got some real political momentum, to the point that you might actually cause dicomfort to the military-industrial complex.

So, in years prior, they’d have been kind of hampered in their ability to fight you. No more. Now, they can know every friend you have, and possibly every friend you’ve had since 2001. All your lovers, all your enemies, your social groups, your online groups, and so on.

If you’re male, did you ever stick your dick in crazy? Well, guess what, she’s now on CNN, talking about you. Did you ever get into an intemperate argument? Suddenly, that’s national news. If you haven’t been absolutely perfect in all respects, everyone is going to know all about it.

But, let’s say you have been perfect. That doesn’t matter. Somewhere in your friends network, and you will have a very large friends network if you have real political influence, there will be people that have been imperfect, maybe very badly imperfect.

Everyone that you’ve ever known that has, up until now, gotten away with stuff, is going to suddenly get a visit from the FBI, and they’re going to use their false-recording tactic, where the second agent writes that they said things they never said. Suddenly, they’re in deep shit. And the FBI has them by the balls. They can either go to jail, or they can say really horrible, awful things about you. Like you raped them, maybe. Rape is a really good one.

In a world with ubiquitous government surveillance, there cannot be meaningful social change, because the conservatives in the government will use their unlimited power to stifle and suppress all dissent. Leaders will not be able to develop, because they will be discredited as soon as they start to form. And major social change without central leadership is very rare.

If the US had had these powers in the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement would not have been successful, and everyone important in Martin Luther King’s terrorist network would be in prison, or perhaps in unmarked graves.

If you want a quick under-10-minute summary of what the big deal with the NSA, GCHQ etc hoovering up all of your data, this is a good one to watch. Remember, they are not only hoovering up Americans’ data – they are hoovering up any data they can get their hands on. This means that if you use any of the big American technology services (Google mail, Google search, Youtube, Microsoft Hotmail, Skype, Yahoo! Mail, Dropbox, Apple services, Amazon etc), your data is being collected.

Here’s a few people who had both the guts and the skill to improve our world.

The guy on the left is Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, intellectual leader of the Free Software movement, who has tirelessly, often in the face of mockery, preached his gospel: Software is knowledge, and knowledge should be free for all.

Here he’s grinning alongside Julian Assange, Wikileaker extraordinaire, persecuted by the world’s most powerful governments, for months now unable to leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Assange had the balls to give us knowledge and to not stand down when the powers that be threatened him and came after him.

They are holding a picture of Edward Snowden, the latest NSA whistleblower who had the balls to throw away his comfortable, high-earning, high-status life to give us all some of the raw truth about how our governments operate. About how we have allowed our societies to resemble George Orwell’s 1984 to a worrying degree. He’s also prosecuted by the most powerful governments of this world.

Here’s a well-written biography of Edward Snowden, which captures the issues the world is facing after his brave disclosures succinctly. Highly recommended reading.

Note: Page numbers are from the Penguin edition ISBN 978-0-14-200342-8

p.41: Proof that the US have been capable of global-range drone missions at least as early as the early 1960s:

One morning just before eight o’clock John (ed: McNaughton) came back from McNamara’s office minutes after he’d gotten a call and dashed out. He said to me, “A Blue Springs drone has gone down in China. Bob is seeing the press at eight-thirty. We have ten minutes to write six alternative lies for him.”

It was the only time I remember the actual word “lies” being used. Blue Springs was the code name for an espionage program for reconnaissance photographic flights by unmanned drone planes.

p.213: On the responsibility of people who do not actively oppose wrongdoing:

Nearly all evildoing, she pointed out, like nearly all coercive power, legitimate and illegitimate, depends on the cooperation, on the obedience and support, on the assent or at least passive tolerance of many people. It relies on many more collaborators than are conscious of their roles; these include even many victims, along with passive bystanders, as in effect accomplices.

p.237: Ellsberg’s advice to Henry Kissinger on the psychological and behavioural effects of secret clearances on people:

“Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.

“I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. (ed: emphasis in original) And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.

“First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all – so much! incredible! – suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.

“You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t… and that all those other (ed: emphasis in original) people are fools.

“Over a longer period of time – not too long, but a matter of two or three years – you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a while to learn.

“In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn (ed: emphasis in original) from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What could this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that (ed: emphasis in original) mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues… and with myself.

“You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you” become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”

p.254: On the arrogance of power plaguing the US administration:

There was some realistic basis for the belief that many Vietnamese were naive and misled in their notions of what a Communist-led victory would do for them. But as I now realized, we American officials were no less ignorant or self-deceptive, in turn, about the nature of French rule or of the various Saigon regimes we supported or imposed later or the incentives that would lead people to take up and persist in armed struggle against greatly superior forces – and above all, about the burden of the war on the rural population. In any case, to presume to judge what was best for them, with life and death at stake, was the height of imperial arrogance, the “arrogance of power,” as Senator Fullbright later called it.

p.269 On the difficulty of stepping out of line and doing something you believe in for the first time:

Something very important had happened to me. I felt liberated. I doubt if I could have explained that at the time. But by now I have seen this exhilaration often enough in others, in particular people who have just gone through their first action of civil disobedience, whether or not they have been taken to jail. This simple vigil, my first public action, had freed me from a nearly universal fear whose inhibiting force, I think, is very widely underestimated. I had become free of the fear of appearing absurd, of looking foolish, for stepping out of line.

p.289 On how the Thai Khac Chuyen murder case blew the lid off Ellsberg’s passive tolerance of official lies and helped him decide to do something about it:

I lay in bed that Tuesday morning and thought: This is the system that I have been working for, the system I have been part of, for a dozen years – fifteen, including the Marine Corps. It’s a system that lies automatically, at every level from bottom to top – from sergeant to commander in chief – to conceal murder.

That described, as I had come to realize from my reading that month, what that system had been doing in Vietnam, on an infinitely larger scale, continuously for a third of a century. And it was still going on. I thought: I’m not going to be a part of it anymore. I’m not going to be part of this lying machine, this cover-up, this murder, anymore.

It occurred to me that what I had in my safe at Rand was seven thousand pages of documentary evidence of lying, by four presidents and their administrations over twenty-three years, to conceal plans and actions of mass murder. I decided I would stop concealing that myself. I would get it out somehow.

p. 394 On the surveillance capabilities of the FBI in the 1970s. We can only imagine how much this has changed, in the favour of the government, in our current era of pervasive wholesale surveillance:

The main secret to avoid being found by the FBI (in the 1970s) seemed to be: Don’t use your home or office phone.

[…]

On one occasion, “Mr Boston” went downstairs and across the street to a phone booth on the corner, about fifty yards from the apartment building where were staying that afternoon. He talked for about ten minutes to my friends Lloyd Shearer in Los Angeles, relaying some questions I had for Shearer, who was giving me advice on whom to deal with in the media. We happened to be looking out the front window when he left the booth and came back. Just as he entered the front door, perhaps twelve minutes from the time he placed the call, four police cars converged on the phone booth from two directions. Brakes screeched, and police jumped our with guns drawn, though the booth was now empty. Evidently Shearer’s line was tapped.

p.413 A glimpse into the administration’s psyche and why leaking hard evidence hurts their license to do whatever they want. It’s not so much the content of the leaks – but bringing to light the fact that the administration will sometimes be wrong. That’s why accountability, checks and balances at all levels are important:

H. R. Haldeman to President Nixon, Oval Office tapes, June 14, 1971, on the impact of the Pentagon Papers:To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say; and you can’t rely on their judgement. And the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it’s wrong, and the president can be wrong.

p.418 People who have lost touch with reality casually discussing mass murder from their ivory tower – the Oval Office:

Two hours later, at noon, H. R. Haldeman and Ron Ziegler joined Kissinger and Nixon:President: How many did we kill in Laos?Ziegler: Maybe ten thousand – fifteen?Kissinger: In the Laotian thing, we killed about ten, fifteen…President: See, the attack in the North that we have in mind… power plants, whatever’s left – POL [petroleum], the docks… And, I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?Kissinger: About two hundred thousand people.President: No, no, no… I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?Kissinger: That, I think, would just be too much.President: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? … I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.

p.426 The (disgusting) light side of mass murder:

[…] the president was particularly concerned that the bombing of Cambodia in early 1969 and later (code-named Menu, for a series of raids initially code-named Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner) might be about to be revealed.

p.428 How the system of secrecy was used to mislead Congress and to hide entire bombing campaigns:

Moreover, Congress, which had to appropriate the money for these operations, had been given false top secret documentation on what country they were paying to bomb. Hundreds of military staffers in MACV and CINCPAC headquarters were kept busy faking classified flight plans and after-action reports of the bombing raids, falsifying the coordinates of the actual targets to indicate they were in South Vietnam rather than in Cambodia. When in 1970 Nixon ordered secret bombing of the Plain of Jars in Laos (which had no relation to infiltration routes), he used the same system of dual bookkeeping he had used to conceal the bombing of Cambodia.

[…]

A modern president’s practical ability to drop secretly several hundred thousand tons of bombs in a country with which we were not at war was a considerable tribute to the effectiveness of the postwar secrecy system. It gives our presidents a capability to initiate and escalate a war in secret that was scarcely possessed by monarchs of the past.

A popular government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps, both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.

p.457 Powerful closing remarks of an excellent book:

As Judge Byrne in Los Angeles was issuing his dismissal of our indictment, which had been anticipated all morning in the Oval Office discussions, the president addressed the situation in anguish and perplexity:

For example, on this national security thing, we have the rocky situation where the sonofabitching thief is made a national hero and is going to get off on a mistrial. And the New York Times gets a Pulitzer Prize for stealing documents… They’re trying to get at us with thieves. What in the name of God have we come to?

What we had come back to was a democratic republic – not an elected monarchy – a government under law, with Congress, the courts, and the press functioning to curtail executive abuses, as our Constitution envisioned.